MAGISTER: Quality assurance of Magic applications for software developers and end users

Abstract

Nowadays there are many tools and methods available for source code quality assurance based on static analysis, but most of these tools focus on traditional software development techniques with 3GL languages. Besides procedural languages, 4GL programming languages such as Magic 4GL and Progress are widely used for application development. All these languages lie outside the main scope of analysis techniques. In this paper we present MAGISTER, which is a quality assurance framework for applications being developed in Magic, a 4GL application development solution created by Magic Software Enterprises. MAGISTER extracts data using static analysis methods from applications being developed in different versions of Magic (v5-9 and uniPaaS). The extracted data (including metrics, rule violations and dependency relations) is presented to the user via a GUI so it can be queried and visualized for further analysis. It helps software developers, architects and managers through the full development cycle by performing continuous code scans and measurements.